More Golden Age British Mystery Fiction by Ethel Lina White

• Put Out the Light, 1931. A small-town murder mystery with a local constable and an ensemble cast about a neurotic and narcissistic self-made millionaire businesswoman who pits her three adopted children against each other for fun and has ambiguously but disturbingly romantic attachments to the male ones. This one also features some burglary and has the distinction of a section in dog point of view, sort of. It's actually omniscient narrator, but it's definitely following the dog for a while. Two tiresome young romances, a lot of coincidences, about 2/3 of the book over before the murder takes place, and a thoroughly disappointing twist ending. The twist is so terrible I have to think the author started writing without knowing how she was going to end, although in fairness, there are some clues early in the story. Also, the author needs serious therapy for her issues with older women, beauty, sexuality, and marriage, although at least the characters in the cast are exceptionally vivid and interesting.



• Fear Stalks the Village, 1932. A small idyllic village is stirred up by a series of poison pen letters leading to a suspicious death and some additional suicides. This story is impossible not to compare to Agatha Christie's The Moving Finger (1943), which was memorably filmed with a good cast in 2006 for ITV's extremely variable-quality Marple series: Geraldine McEwan, James D'Arcy, Emilia Fox, Talulah Riley, Frances de la Tour, Sean Pertwee, Imogen Stubbs, Jessica Hynes, Kelly Brook. At the beginning I was comparing it quite favorably to Christie. There was a loud, genial, tacky writer of boys' own adventure stories, the kind of character I couldn't remember ever finding in Christie, and several other interesting points of view to follow - a restless young lady acting as a paid companion who views romance with cynicism but decides she needs to get married regardless, and a fire-and-brimstone-style parson who is a musclebound and not-too-bright young man. This one was fairly gripping almost right until the end, but the end was even worse than the previous one. I can't say I think she came up with it after the fact, because it was one of the first possibilities I guessed in the foreshadowing chapter, but I think there were more red herrings that were just left dangling than clues that actually tied into the plot and made sense at the end. The end was also emotionally quite unsatisfying for several plots, apparently by accident, almost as if she had to trim a chapter's worth of words off in order to fit a limit or something. An ignominious crash that ultimately compares very poorly to Christie's version (admittedly written ten years later, I know), in spite of a bunch of more interesting possibilities at the beginning.